Falling Together (33 page)

“She’s in the Philippines,” he said. “Cebu.”

“Motherfucker!” The word slammed into Will’s ear, more bark than yell, so venomous, so searingly vicious that Will jerked the phone away from his ear. Jason hung up.

For a dazed second, Will stared at the phone in his hand. Then, hurriedly, he began to flip through the possibilities. Was the expletive free-floating, an expression of frustration in general? At how far away Cat was? Will didn’t think so. It sounded personal, directed, like that venom that snakes in Africa spit straight into the eyes of their enemies. But who was Jason spitting at? Will? Sam? Probably not, although Jason wasn’t above being a “shoot the messenger” kind of guy. Cat’s dad? Will remembered the conversation in the reunion tent, how Jason had said that Dr. Ocampo wasn’t exactly a person who showed up for Cat. Pretty clearly, Jason hadn’t been crazy about the man, had probably not liked him enough to be thrilled about Cat’s going on a pilgrimage to his homeland, but he hadn’t seemed to hate him, either, and that “motherfucker” had been all about hate.

Could he have meant it for Cat? Not Cat. Jason loved Cat. But who else was there?

“Shit,” said Will again, this being a shit kind of morning, and he scrambled to call Jason back, dropping his phone in the process. As he picked it up, it rang.

“Sorry to hang up like that,” said Jason with a hollow chuckle. “Guess what you said threw me off a little.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Will evenly.

“I just pictured my little Cat, all by herself in the tropics. And the traveling? The multiple plane changes and what have you? Forget about it. Cat gets lost on the way to the grocery store. I had this vision of her wandering around the Hong Kong airport like a lost kitten.”

Will didn’t buy it. Jason’s “motherfucker” had been instantaneous, like a gun going off, with no time for him to picture much of anything. Anyway, the Cat Will had known had had as good a sense of direction as anyone. Pen was the one who got lost. Then there was Jason’s tone of cheerful concern, which would’ve been creepily inappropriate, even if it hadn’t been so obviously fake. Will knew a thing or two about rage, and he felt the rage seething under everything Jason said. Even as Jason fussed like a mother hen about his “little Cat,” Will would’ve bet that he had just thrown something heavy across the room and watched it smash.

“It makes sense that you’d be worried,” said Will neutrally.

“Plus, I thought she was over her dad. His death, I mean. Come to find out she’s zipped off ten thousand miles to do what? Mourn at his birthplace? Get to know him? Discover her island roots?”

“Yeah, I guess she’s not over it.”

“Ya think?”

He’s going to go after her,
Will thought.

“What are you thinking?” he asked. “That you’ll go look for her?”

There was a silence and then, with the good-guy tone turned up a notch, Jason said, “Nah. My wife wants some alone time. I can respect that. I’ll just hang out, hold down the fort, as they say, until she’s back.”

It was exactly the right answer, and Will knew a lie when he heard it.

As soon as he hung up with Jason, Will called Pen.

“Hey, Will,” she said. Her voice, hushed and quick, told him she was with someone, probably a client. “Call you back in an hour or two?”

“Sure,” said Will. “Wait. Actually—” But Pen had already hung up.

Maybe it was better, Will thought, take a couple of hours, settle down, get some perspective. He could admit that, on its face, his reaction to Jason’s reaction had been a little extreme, since all Jason had done was get mad, something Will had done plenty of times himself. A guy who had flat out attacked a whole slew of inanimate objects—and several animate ones—with his bare hands, whose temper had landed him (if not, by the grace of God, other people) in the emergency room more than once, should be able to cut Jason and his single outburst some slack. After all, the poor sap had just found out that his wife hadn’t just walked out on him but had pretty much walked as far away from him as it was possible to go—and all without leaving so much as a note.

Still, Will couldn’t shake the foreboding. It was as if that single, knee-jerk “motherfucker” had punched a hole in Jason’s dopey-guy demeanor, and, through it, Will had glimpsed an interior that was uglier than he would’ve believed. Will’s mother was always telling her kids to “listen to your inner voice,” and Will’s inner voice was practically shouting that Jason’s heading off to find Cat with all of that ugliness churning just under his surface was a very bad idea.

Will looked at the clock: 12:45, about seven hours later than Will’s preferred time for a run, especially in the summer, but he had a couple of hours to kill and there was no way he was getting any work done before he talked to Pen. He changed, zipped his cell phone into his pocket, gulped down a glass of water, and headed out. It was so muggy that his shirt was sticking to him before he’d gone a mile, but running had been a good idea. His worry unclenched, stretched and flattened like the hot ribbon of street, resolved itself into a flow of thought that was steady and more or less coherent.

Even though he knew it was the middle of the night where she was, he imagined Cat under the same high white sun that burned above him, making her way through a busy city. He had no trouble bringing Cat to life inside his head, he never did, her black hair and thin wrists and sandals, glamour-girl sunglasses covering half her face, a flowered dress. And even though he couldn’t picture the city with any accuracy, had never even seen photos of it that he could remember, he sketched it in around her anyway: fruit stands, traffic, palm trees splayed against the sky, a goat tethered to a stake in somebody’s yard. Cat was there, a girl on a mission, walking where her father had walked, looking for what?

Will came to the kind of hill that makes it impossible to think or do anything but force your body up it, but on the way down, inside his head but so clearly that he was tempted to look around to see who said it, Will heard a question being asked in a familiar voice: “How did your dad get to be your dad?” It took him only a second to realize the voice was Cat’s.

The last day of sophomore year. Finals behind them and everywhere spring hitting its peak and toppling over into summer: humidity, old oak pollen balled like tumbleweed in the gutters, every kid on campus newly tan and as abundantly, showily happy as the trees were dense and green, except for Will who sprawled sullenly on the grass, the cast on his newly broken hand pissing him off with its whiteness, Cat next to him with her sunglasses on top of her head (she thought it was hideously rude to have a conversation with someone while wearing sunglasses) and her pink skirt tucked primly around her crossed legs.

His parents had swung through town the day before on their way to meet a bunch of other rich couples—friends of his father’s—for a golf weekend at a southern mountain resort (the fact that his mother hated the resort, the couples, and golf evidently having no bearing on his father’s decision to take her along or on her decision to go). Things went about the way they usually went between Will and his dad, except that this time, after the obligatory post-paternal-visit fistfight with something immovable and hard (in this instance, his car windshield), in addition to the usual breakage (spirit, dignity), Will had thrown in a few cracked metacarpals for good measure.

Cat and Will were drinking iced coffee and waiting for Pen, who was meeting with her nineteenth-century British lit professor to discuss a paper she’d written on images of women’s hair in Victorian poetry, despite a horrified Cat’s having pointed out to her that nobody, nobody, nobody in all of human history had ever made an appointment with a professor to discuss a paper she’d gotten an “A” on, especially on the last day of school before summer break. “He will be flabbergasted. Flummoxed,” warned Cat. “He will almost definitely keel over and die right there in front of you.” But Pen had gone anyway.

“How did your dad get to be your dad?” asked Cat suddenly. “Have you ever thought about that?”

“You mean how did he meet my mom?”

“No,” said Cat impatiently. “I mean how did he get to be
your dad
in all his awful your dadness? How did he become the man he is?”

Will found that the question irritated him. “Does it matter?”

“Don’t get testy with me, mister,” said Cat, giving him what Pen called her “mad Persian cat face.” “I’m not talking about an excuse because nothing gets him off the hook for being the rat bastard he is. I’m talking about an explanation. Where did he
come
from? How does someone
get
so mean?”

Oddly, Will had never really considered this question before, his father’s meanness having always been one of the immutable bedrock facts of Will’s life. With his family, Randall Wadsworth was either distant and indifferent or the coldest kind of cruel, and although there had always been moments when Will watched his father talk to other men and change into someone else, joking, backslapping, affable, the real man was still right there—Will could sense him—invulnerable and dangerous and enjoying his power.

“I don’t think he
became,”
said Will. “I think he was just born.”

“Come on,” said Cat. “He was a kid, right? He went to school. Drank chocolate milk. Wore pajamas.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Even Hitler was, like, seven once, Will. There had to be a moment.”

“A moment when he turned into a fucking, soulless monster?”

“No. A last chance that someone missed. A moment when he could’ve been saved.”

The only evidence Will had that his father had ever been a child was a handful of memories of a visit to his father’s mother’s house. Will must have been about three or four, and he had stayed, alone, at his grandmother’s for what had seemed like a long time, but was probably only a couple of days. The memories were more like fragments, tiny sensory scraps: a turquoise-and-white metal porch glider; the sound of the television going all day long in another room; crescent rolls that popped out of a cardboard cylinder and tasted like heaven; the silky edge of a scratchy blue acrylic blanket; and smoking, a lot of smoking: a cigarette perpetually balanced on the edge of a shell-shaped ashtray on the kitchen counter; his grandmother snapping beans on the porch with a cigarette somehow stuck between her fingers, sending the smell of smoke across the front yard to where Will dug in the mulch with a plastic trowel.

“She wasn’t mean? Abusive?” asked Cat, when Will told her about this.

“Not to me.”

“You liked her.”

“I think so. Her house seemed—safe. Pretty soon after I went there, she died. I don’t know how I know that, though. I can’t remember going to a funeral or anything.”

“What did your dad say about her, over the years?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“My dad isn’t the storytelling type,” said Will sardonically. “He doesn’t spin yarns. When he does talk about growing up, it’s like he’s reading his résumé. The boarding school he got himself into in ninth grade, his whole thousand-mile-long record of achievement after that. His mother is nowhere, totally erased.”

“What about his father?”

“No idea. Maybe he never had one.”

“Maybe it was Satan,” suggested Cat.

Will grinned. “That would explain things, wouldn’t it?”

Cat’s eyes grew serious. She touched her fingertips to Will’s, the ones that emerged from the plaster of the cast. “Maybe you’ll want to dig a little deeper one day,” she said. “If you knew more about him, maybe he’d lose his power to hurt you.” Even though Will didn’t believe this, he heard the kindness in Cat’s voice and felt the force of her friendship, her allegiance to him, and he thought, not for the first time,
You are my family, more than the rat bastard has ever been, you and Pen.

Now, thinking about Cat searching for her father, Will realized that he had never searched for his, had never taken her advice. He’d had his mother back for years and had never asked her anything about who his father used to be, never even asked about the trip to his grandmother’s house. Why had Will gone by himself? Where was that house, apart from inside Will’s head, turning itself into myth? It was crazy: to visit a place once and spend your whole life missing it.

I might ask,
he thought.
One of these days. Maybe after I come back from finding Cat.

Which is when he knew that he would go.
Yeah, right
. He could almost hear Cat saying this.
Like there was ever any doubt
.

W
HEN
P
EN CALLED, BEFORE
W
ILL COULD SAY ANYTHING BESIDES
, “Hey, Pen,” she said, “Okay. I have a story and a question. In that order.”

“Is it a long story?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“I have something to say, too, believe it or not,” said Will, “which is why I called you.”

“I called you.”

“You’re calling me back.”

“Of course. You’re right. Your story should take precedence, absolutely,” said Pen. “But can I go first, anyway?”

“Okay.”

“It is kind of a long story if you want to know the truth.”

“Forget it, then.”

“I just saw Patrick.”

“Is that unusual?”

“I mean I sat across from him at a table at a café and had a conversation with him.”